1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus for transmitting print data to a printer, a printing instruction method, and a storage medium storing a computer program.
2. Description of Related Art
Various techniques of print instruction for an image forming device with transmitting data indicating the printing details thereto have been conventionally devised. A printer driver that has a function of generating a PDL (page description language) instructs an image forming device to print with converting an instruction that is issued by an operating system (OS) or an application program into a PDL, and transferring the PDL to the image forming device.
On the other hand, in some of recent image forming devices, a function for performing a printing process by transmitting an image file, for example, in a PDF (portable document format) or TIFF (tagged image file format) format to the image forming devices without converting it into a PDL is installed. In a case where a display unit such as a CRT and a liquid crystal display is provided on the side of an external apparatus such as a personal computer (PC) for instructing the image forming device to print, techniques are put into practice that display an icon indicating a file, for example, in the PDF or TIFF format that is to be printed, and an icon indicating the image forming device on the display unit, and instruct printing by dragging and dropping one icon onto the other icon.
JP 2003-241931A discloses a technique that displays a thumbnail indicating a file on a display unit, and that displays a list of printing conditions that are registered in advance when the thumbnail is dragged onto a printer icon using a pointing device such as a mouse. When the user further drags the thumbnail to any one of the printing conditions in the displayed list and drops the thumbnail thereonto, it is possible to print the file in the selected printing condition.
When the technique in JP 2003-241931A described above is applied, the position of the drop event may be displaced from the intended position depending on such as an appearance of the list, a use environment, or the character of a user. For example, the URLs (uniform resource locators) of WWWs (world wide webs) are often registered in “favorite”, and there is a case in which an unintended URL is mistakenly selected when selecting a registered URL. Usually, no actual harm is caused in the case of the WWW, but in a case where printing conditions are selected, for example, if the position of the drop event is displaced due to a hand trembling with cold, an erroneous selection is made and it may lead to waste of resources such as recording paper.